Antonio Molina - A Manuscript of Ashes

"Let's go, comrades," I heard someone saying to me, one voice very close in the silence in which for ten seconds all the shouts in the plaza had exploded, the butt of a musket and a body that detached me from Mariana as he made his way between the two of us, while we avoided looking at each other and again were lost and inert and trying to pretend that our embarrassment wasn't real, that the embrace like a lightning flash of desire hadn't happened. "Let's go, comrades, let me pass, I want to see the face of that spy when they bring him out," said the voice at my side, a boy summarily dressed as a militiaman who elbowed his way forward raising his musket, probably unloaded and useless, like a banner. "What's going on?" Mariana asked him, "who's been arrested?" and he told us, as if excited by fever, that two days earlier they had arrested a Fascist spy in a Magina hotel and now they were preparing to take him to the provincial prison in the Assault Guards' van. "But this is where justice should be done. That Fascist is ours. They say he wanted to put a bomb in the House of the People, the murderer." He moved away from us, hitting the bodies in his path with the butt of the musket, and I saw him disappear or sink among the heads, shouting as if he were alone, and then resurface, hanging onto the grating at a window very close to the police station, his musket waving at the end of the overly long strap that held it around his neck. "Now they'll bring him out," he shouted, pointing at the six guards who had climbed out of the van to form a second, tighter line next to the door of the police station, which someone was beginning to open very cautiously. "He's coming out now," announced the boy, and a single great roar extended over the plaza as the crowd pushed with dark violence against the cordon of guards, "they have him at the door, they're going to bring him out right now." The man on the balcony reluctantly threw away his cigarette and disappeared behind the glass, and as if that were a signal, the guards stood more erect until they seemed taller in their blue uniforms, and at the same time they released the bolts on their rifles. When the door to the police station was finally opened, all the voices suddenly became muffled and faded into a sound very similar to silence. Unmoving eyes, raised heads, banners, high and red at midday, quiet among the trees. Without realizing it Mariana painfully squeezed my hand. "There's a guard in the doorway," I said. "He's pointing at someone with a pistol." The guard walked backward, saying something I couldn't hear as he waved the pistol, half-turned toward the encircling crowd. Behind him a man came out with bowed head and cuffed hands, whom the other guards shoved toward the van. Surrounded by them, the man didn't seem to walk but simply to yield as if in a lethargy to the momentum of the rifles hitting him, wounded by the cruelty of the sudden light blinding his eyes after two days of darkness, avoiding it, very pale, already sleepwalking to his death. Before climbing into the back of the van, he stood motionless, as if he didn't understand what they were ordering him to do, and he raised his head for the first time to look at the wall of faces, silent on the other side of the rifles. He had straightened up like someone who hears his name and cannot determine where the call is coming from. Then the boy hanging on the grate shouted "murderer," and abruptly thrust out his hand that no longer held his military cap but something I didn't see, and he whistled and knocked the handcuffed man down among the legs of the guards at the same time that the revived crowd and the long shout and the rage dragged us helplessly toward the door of the police station, knocking down the barrier of rifles and uniforms and lifting into the air the bloodstained body of the prisoner who rebounded against the wall and fell to the paving stones and was again hoisted up and thrown by unanimous open hands that came up to hit him or claw at his face or his torn shirt. I saw his eyes, I saw the gleam of blood streaming from the corners of his mouth and the last shred of a black tie around his neck, I saw him get to his knees, panting, and run like a goaded, wounded animal toward the stone columns of the portico. He threw his arms around one of them, his mouth convulsed against the rough yellow stone, turned toward his persecutors who had stopped, waiting for something or merely witnessing his death agony, forming a circle of silence around the column. Without closing his eyes, without moving his mouth away from the stone edge where he seemed to be searching for air, he began to slip to the ground as slowly as the thread of his blood flowed down the column, his hands together, as if hidden in his groin, his tongue torn in a very dark, not red coagulated mass that didn't completely spill out between his lips when he stopped moving.

Then I remember the plaza gradually emptying and the contracted body beside the column, but that image is lost in the image of other bodies I didn't see, my father's, illuminated by the headlights of a truck at the foot of the cemetery wall, the solitary dead body my father saw on July 19, 1936, at a corner of the Plaza of San Lorenzo. Bodies without faces as if biting the bitter earth or the pavement of a street, abandoned to the sun, in an empty siesta hour, dead and alone, rotting and alone, without name or dignity or glory, exactly like dead animals in the mud of a river. Silently we entered the water before dawn, raising the rifles with both hands above our heads, and we stepped on something soft that sank, something slimy and corrupt, mud and corpses of drowned mules under the weight of a machine gun and human bodies that seemed stripped of bones. I remember the Plaza of General Orduna as if I were seeing it from high above, at an hour made even emptier because the tower clock could not announce it: the empty pedestal, Manuel's car, the body that an Assault Guard poked at with the end of his rifle. Mariana and I walked very slowly, keeping our distance from each other, to the car, sat down in it, not saying anything, not asking each other where Orlando and Santiago were now. Mariana placed her tense hands on the steering wheel and looked at the empty plaza or only at the dirty glass that separated us from it. Her disheveled chestnut hair covered her profile like a veil conceived of only to keep me from seeing her. I said her name in a quiet voice, and she looked at me in the rearview mirror without turning toward me. I placed a hand on her knee without daring to acknowledge or feel the shape of her thigh under the thin skirt, as if desiring her at that moment would have been disloyalty. When we returned to Manuel's house, he hadn't come back yet from the country house, and Orlando and Santiago were waiting for us in the library, a little drunk, very close together on the sofa, laughing at something they were whispering in each other's ear, their glasses raised, as if they couldn't remember the reason for having a toast.

THE LIGHT, EVERY NIGHT, round and yellow and high like a minor moon that belonged only to the plaza, the one light burning at midnight in the darkness of Magina, the one consciousness, Manuel thought, not made sluggish by the still intact stupefaction of the war and the extremely long winter that after eight years seemed to prolong it. He returned to the house at dusk, after seeing Medina in his office on his slow walk that normally took him to the watchtower in the wall, and before pushing open the door, he stopped for a while under the acacias to look at the lighted window in the room where Jacinto Solana was writing at that very moment. He imagined he could hear the sound of the typewriter through the rain, and he continued to hear it, confused with the rain or with the murmur of Jacinto Solana's voice, when he woke in the middle of the night fleeing the vast hand that opened his chest to tear out his heart the way you tear a root out of clod-filled wet ground. The multiplied, metallic blows sounded above his head like rain on the balcony glass and the insomniac footsteps of the man who never seemed to sleep or abandon for a single second his perpetual vigil in front of the typewriter or around it, always uncovered, Teresa told him, beginning at dawn, like a mechanical animal on the desk that Solana circled when he couldn't write, pacing blindly through the smoke of his cigarettes and the importunate labyrinth of his memory, walking in circles of obsessive geometry like an insect flying around a lamp. At eleven the electricity was cut off and all the streets and windows in Magina were erased by the sudden flood of darkness, but then, after a few minutes during which the circle of the window vanished in the high blackness of the house, a yellower, fainter light appeared and in it was outlined the shadow of the solitary man who had lit the first candle of the night to illuminate his insomnia of written or rejected words, and at times Manuel, hidden under the branches of the acacias, would see Jacinto Solana smoking, motionless, in the circle of light, looking at the swamp of shadows where he tossed the butt like someone who throws a stone down a well and waits to hear it hit the water. Then he would close the window, and Manuel would hear again the distant metallic blows of his writing, as usual among the sounds in the house as the beating of blood in his temples, and like a coward he would approach them, going up in silence to the very door of the room, but when he extended his hand to knock, he would stop and listen to the footsteps on the parquet or the sound of the typewriter, and he never knocked because he was afraid Solana would not want to receive him.